Image by: Simon Cunningham
Thanks to YourMembership.com for producing last week’s webinar that pulled in over 100 participants to hear about the strategic value of an integrated online community (check out the recording).
The underlying premise of the webinar was that an online community that integrates with your back-office CRM database, capturing online activity in your database of record, allows your organization to directly tie online engagement to ROI. When you can correlate activity in your community to favorable business outcomes like retention, product purchases, event attendance, and etc., it becomes far easier to prove the ROI of your community efforts. This takes you beyond the intermediate step of Return on Engagement and gets you straight to dollars and cents ROI.
ASAE’s landmark Decision to Join study proves that an engaged member is more likely to take a number of other actions that result in positive outcomes and contribute to the bottom line. Here’s a more thorough list of indirect revenue sources that you should consider when making the case for your community’s ROI:
- Increased retention
- Increased referrals via word of mouth
- Increased event attendance
- Increased product purchases
- Increased volunteerism
With an integrated online community that pushes activity data back into your database, you’re able to analyze the correlation between community activity and these outcomes. If the research in Decision to Join holds true for your organization, you should see a positive correlation between members who engage in your community and those who don’t. Then, by multiplying a dollar value (stay tuned for a future post on how to come up with the dollar values) for each of the above by the positive variance between the engaged and unengaged, you can show how many MORE dollars your active community members are contributing to the bottom line.
There’s more ROI to be squeezed from an online community, and we’ll dive into that in another future post. Plus, based on feedback from the YourMembership.com webinar and from other ROI conversations, we’ve decided to write a white paper and create tools to help you better explain community ROI to stakeholders. Subscribe to our blog (opens Feedburner page) if you’d like to be notified when they’re released.
